Who?
If you’re an entrepreneur at any stage of your journey, or even an aspiring one, and you need money to start or grow your business, this course is for you.
What?
This course will introduce, and help you put to use in your startup, the five models through which your customers can – and will, if you ask them! – fund your business. These five time-tested models have been put to use by entrepreneurial superstars like Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and more. Sadly, though, the five models are rarely talked about and not widely understood. Until now! The five models will be brought to life by the real-world stories of an inspiring collection of incredibly creative entrepreneurs from around the world – including successes and failures – through a series of captivating no-holds-barred interviews with founders and others, and investors, too.
Why?
More than two generations ago, the venture capital community – VC’s, business angels, incubators, and others – convinced the entrepreneurial world that writing business plans and raising venture capital constituted the twin centerpieces of entrepreneurial endeavor. They did so for very good reasons: the sometimes astonishing returns they’ve delivered to their investors and the incredibly large and valuable companies their ecosystem has created. But the vast majority of fast growing companies never take any angel or venture funding. Are they onto something that most of today’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has missed? Indeed, should a business angel or VC be seen as the first port of call for getting your nascent entrepreneurial venture off the ground or growing it faster? Perhaps not.
How?
You’ll be asked to do a series of exercises – out in the real world – to put your growing toolkit to use in your business or the one you hope to start. Hands-on, practical tools to help your business start and thrive – without venture capital. You’ll join our discussion board of fellow participants, if you like, and learn from others who are putting the tools to work, just as you are. And to suit today’s fast-paced lifestyles, we’ve broken what you’ll get – short lessons, interviews, thought-provoking questions, even some optional things to read – into bite-sized chunks, so you can log in and grab them whenever and wherever you are.
And what else?
If, after checking out and perhaps completing this course, you find your company in a position where seeking venture capital turns out to be the right thing to do next, John Mullins leads an inspiring and hands-on executive education course at London Business School – this one face-to-face – called Financing the Entrepreneurial Business. There, among a room full of investors and entrepreneurs, you’ll study a series of captivating real-world cases and learn everything an entrepreneur – or an investor, for that matter – needs to know to handle the person who sits across the deal table and take an entrepreneurial business from start-up to exit. See https://www.london.edu/education-and-development/executive-education/topic/finance/financing-the-entrepreneurial-business#.WIVY_FyTQ-0 for info.

MA

I have learned a lot from this course. I think i have been changed after completing it. New ideas and better understanding for business.

SQ

Oct 16, 2016

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

This is a fabulous course, a must take for aspiring and practicing entrepreneurs. Guides you how to survive and swim along the sharks.

从本节课中

Module 1: Why taking venture capital is a bad idea

Welcome to Module 1! As you can see by the title of this first module, I hope to convince you in this chunk of the course that seeking (and taking) money from an angel or VC investor, at least early in the life of your venture, is an exceedingly bad idea. Here we go!

教学方

John Mullins

Associate Professor of Management Practice

脚本

[MUSIC] Okay, welcome back. Time flies when you're having fun, right? So what do you think of those interviews? Amazing, right? And Bruce Golden, that perspective from VC investor in Silicon Valley, really provocative stuff. So to wrap up module one, I want to do a couple of things here just in a few minutes. Number one, I want to remind you of the five customer funded models, and how you might want to think about them at this point. Number two, I want to tee up some things that you might want to read if you bought the customer funded business. And I also want to suggest some optional readings that we'll provide for you here that will put more arrows into your entrepreneurial quiver. And I want to remind you that mine is not the only voice saying customer funding is a better way forward for many of you, at least at the outset of your business. And then last, I want to give you an assignment to do before you start on module two. So let's get started. First, you've now learned there are five ways to fund your business with your customers' money, as shown in this figure that you saw earlier. For those of you who are still at the I want to run my own business stage, you might think of these five models as one more filter through which you can run the ideas you may have in mind. Wouldn't it be great if you could start a business that could be funded this way? Not all businesses can as we'll see later in this course. So for those of you with an opportunity in mind, maybe even a business planner completed business model canvass in hand. Or who have already proven that your technology works. You might start thinking about the five models and which of them might work in the business you have in mind. Maybe you don't need to stay with us for all seven modules, or maybe you want to focus on a certain one of them first and can just focus on one or two of them. You've already heard several voices other than mine, providing a wider set of views on these customer-funded ideas. But there are surely others in your community too whose views I'd like you to hear. So here's the assignment, that those of you who are taking this course for a certificate need to do. And that the rest of you just might want to do to help build your network and add to your entrepreneurial skills. Number one, I'd like you to interview not less than five entrepreneurs. You can do more if you like. Or experienced angel investors in your own community. Tell them about this course you're doing and ask them what, in their experience, are the benefits of taking investment early. And by early I mean taking money before you have paying customers. Then ask them this question, what do they think of the drawbacks of taking DC money that early. Write down what you learn and if you're taking the course for credit submit it to your peers for feedback. Okay, now what else do I suggest you do to wrap up this first module? First, there's an optional article I posted on the website for you to read about discovering unknown unknowns. Unk-unks I call them. The art of getting answers to questions you don't even know to ask. In other words, how to uncover the unknown unknowns that can sink your little startup in a heartbeat. It's a valuable skill. Every entrepreneur needs to have that skill, and this is a great opportunity to begin putting that skill into your arsenal. There's another optional article I'd like you to read as well. It's on the Kennet Partner's website and it's about bootstrapping. Some of you are probably familiar with this idea, this bootstrapping notion, and some of you may already be doing it. Bootstrapping your venture is about finding ways to keep costs down so you don't have to raise money to get started and to grow. It's the flip side, if you like, of the customer funding coin. Customer funding brings the money in, and bootstrapping prevents it from running out too fast. It's a great article, it's free, I highly recommend it. In addition, there's a wonderful recent blog post by a guy named David Heinemeier Hansson. He's the founder of a customer-funded web application company called Basecamp. It's developed a product called Ruby on Rails. Widely used and known by web developers all over the world. It's at the URL we'll provide for you, here. And, I expect you'll find that article, called Reconsider, very thought-provoking as well. For those of you reading along in the customer funded business, I want to draw your attention to a graph. So on page 25 in chapter 1, and there are 3 or 4 pages of discussion implications for you as an entrepreneur and also for investors. It provides some frankly shocking data collected by Josh Learner at Harvard Business School. On the lousy returns VC's have delivered to investors since the beginning of time in the VC industry. I guarantee the data will surprise you and will give you one more reason to think very carefully about taking VC too early. I also suggest you read what I've learned about crowd funding which is one kind of pay in advance model, of course. That, again, is in chapter one. Among other things, you'll learn there is this. Did you know that most of the time if you're going to have a successful crowd funding campaign, you have to bring your own crowd? You might also want to read chapter three on matchmaker models. Which is what we'll be discussing in the next module. Finally, there's a slide with a couple of questions on which you might want to reflect that closes this module. So, there you have it. Module one is now under your belt. Module two, we're going to take an in-depth look at match-maker models. These are models of company like eBay and Airbnb. That bring together buyers and sellers without every owning or touching the stuff that is bought and sold. And we'll have a bunch more stories and interviews, including one with another leading VC investor, also from California. The matchmaker model is a really powerful one, and it's one that many dot-com entrepreneurs have in mind these days. So I know you're going to enjoy hearing about it and how best to put it to use. But meanwhile, my colleague Tiffany is going to stir things up on the discussion board, and get all of you guys learning from one another as well as from me. I'm sure some among you have already raised early money from. Or you know people who have, with both good outcomes and probably with not so good outcomes. So let's start swapping those lessons, learn from one another, and see how vibrant we can make this community. And after all that, we'll head on to module two. Hasta la vista. [MUSIC]